Listening

I think it's a good idea to include listening as part of the practice session. For one thing, it gives you a time to do it. Also, it reminds you of how your pieces sound, so that you can make more progress while you're working.

Playing Through Pieces

This is a very important part of practicing, and it's the kind that you should do the most of before a performance. This is the way to put everything together that you've been working on, and try to make it sound the best to the audience. This is also when you should concentrate the most on tempo, and dynamics, and playing beautifully and expressively. These are the things that the audience enjoys the most about our playing.

However...

Most students do too much of this kind of practicing. There is a tendency to shut off the brain and go on automatic pilot and pay no attention to the piece at all until the last note. This is a horrible, horrible way to practice, and the only thing it can do is build bad habits.

Playing through should be for some purpose, whether it be to improve dynamics, make the tempo consistent (playing with a metronome), or improving vibrato on certain notes. Playing through is NOT a substitute for working on spots.

Working on Spots

This kind of practicing is to improve certain sections of a song, usually only a few notes. A spot should never be more than two measures. There are many reasons for keeping spots small. One is because it's easier to focus that way; one is because it's easier to repeat a smaller section many times; and it also saves you time in practicing, which is a very good thing. It's better to spend your time working on the hardest spots than to go over the things that you don't really need work on.

There are many reasons why we go over spots in practicing. The first reason is always intonation; also, bow strokes, accents, and phrasing are reasons, as well as trying to speed up fast notes until they are in tempo.

Exercises

These are things a teacher gives you that are not part of a musical piece. They are to improve the skills you need in order to be a good violinist, so that when you try to tackle them in a piece, they will be easy. Sometimes exercises are for skills you need to play your current piece, sometimes they are for a piece down the road. A good teacher will make you work on the skills you need for a piece before you learn the piece, that way you can enjoy the music.

Exercises may be preview spots from a future piece, scales, shifting exercises, vibrato, hand/arm techniques, or etudes from a method book. These should be practiced very diligently, because they will save you time in the future.

Especially scales. Practice scales a lot. Some of the greatest violinists spent an hour on scales every day - not just when they were students, but all throughout their careers.

Review

This should be part of every practice session. Playing review songs is how you practice good violin playing, because you don't have to worry about getting the notes right when you play these songs; therefore, you can focus on making things beautiful and doing things well.

It's important for us to review our pieces so that our skills become solid. When our skills are solid, then we can do more complicated things and play more complicated pieces. There is a saying among Suzuki teachers that goes, "Book 1 teaches Book 10." This is very true.

Students who review a lot become the best players. Be sure to set aside time in your practice session to do this.

Fun (Motivation)

This can be kind of tricky, because you don't want to have so much fun that things get silly. However, it's incredibly important to enjoy practicing, because we always learn better when we're engaged. Fun has a very distinct purpose: it's our brains' way of telling us what we really want. We have fun when we're learning something we want to learn, and we learn best when we're having fun.

Fun can come from a game (like the games I play with students in the lessons), or it can come from a relaxed attitude while doing serious things. It's important to stick out your tongue at least once while playing the violin. For one thing, it relaxes all the muscles in your mouth and jaw that can become unnecessarily tense while playing the violin. For another thing, it helps you chill out and enjoy yourself. Which is very important!

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